The Patient:
Haru is 10 year old neutered male Shepherd Mix, weighing in about 49 pounds. This handsome guy presented with head shaking and pawing, as well as some weird jaw trembles. Dad took him in to our clinic to get to the bottom of the shakes, so Haru could be back to his normal happy self!
The Case:
With the symptoms Haru was presenting with, our team automatically waned to run an ear cytology....and dad, being the great fur father he is, happily obliged! Upon initial physical exam, we did find multiple foxtails in his coat and the ears did look sensitive, most likely from the pawing/scratching. However, the ears looked clear internally, but sometimes a nasty ear infection can be tricky and hide itself deep in the canal, so an ear swab is a necessity to find out what kind of infection we’re dealing with...but, oddly enough, the ear cytology came back negative! So, we needed a plan B to get this handsome guy feeling good again. We decided the only way we’re gonna get a true good look is to sedate Haru and do a very thorough otic exam. After grabbing some bloodwork to make sure we were comfortable putting the big guy under sedation, we went to work! We did find a couple of his liver enzymes were slightly elevated, but that did not impact the risk of sedation. The exam lead us to find quite a bit of irritation and some nasty foxtail debris hidden deep down. We then knew exactly what we needed to do to fix our patient right back up!!
(theses are not images we took at 43rd, but these are fantastic examples of what fox tails look like)
The Treatment Plan:
While Haru was still snoozin’, we performed a bilateral ear cleaning on him to make sure we got all the gunk out as much as possible. Then, it was time to wake sleeping beauty up and talk to dad about some medications! Our game plan was to send Haru home with Easotic, our fool proof, go-to ear drops. We also wanted to get him on Hepaticlear, a liver supplement, to get those levels back down to the normal range, and monitor it very closely. We got our fuzzy friend on the schedule for a 10 day progress exam, and a liver enzyme recheck in 1 month following the appointment. This case was a great example of gold standard care from dad, who was ready and willing to do everything to have his buddy fox-tail free, and hearing clearly once again!